A
lotta ciabattaMrs.
Winniker may never know how much influence she has on Hyde Parkers' dinner tables.
A sixth-grade teacher at the Masterman School in Philadelphia during the early
1980s, Mrs. Winniker inherited what used to be a home-economics classroom as a
homeroom. Not one to allow good ovens to go to waste, every Friday she baked herself
challah from dough mixed and shaped at home. The aroma and sight of those shiny
braided loaves were enough to send Lauren Bushnell, AB'95, a quiet little girl
with chestnut curls, digging through cookbooks. Challah was the first loaf Bushnell-now
head bread baker at the new Medici Bakery on 57th Street-ever baked.

Lauren
Bushnell bakes the bread Hyde Parkers love.

"I
would watch her, and I wanted to do it too," says Bushnell, whose teacher
never thought to share her wares. Bread baking became a sometime hobby as Bushnell
grew up to concentrate in math at the U of C and become a Chicago high-school
math teacher. Bread was the last thing on her mind until, a year into teaching
and disenchanted with her career choice, she spotted an ad in the Chicago Reader
for aspiring bakers-seeking "people with more interest than experience."
She telephoned and spent a day trying out baking at Red Hen Bread on Chicago's
North Side. "But it wasn't the right time in my life to make that kind of
change," she says.

A
year later she felt differently and put her brief teaching stint behind her. Several
weeks of on-the-job training later, she took over the mixing shift at Red Hen.
After a year a baking position opened, and she split her time between mixing and
baking, then learned "scaling" (weighing out blobs of dough to shape
and rise) and loaf shaping, first adding demibaguettes, baguettes and then other
breads to her formerly challah-only repertoire.

Meanwhile,
more than a year ago, rumors began circulating around Hyde Park that the Medici
intended to open a bakery one door to the east, in a retail space considered by
some to be cursed. The spot's most recent occupant, the student-run Stay Up Forever
café, lasted only a year, and predecessors, including a clothing store
and a diner, met equally early demises.

"I
figured I should have some say about what went in around the corner from me,"
recalls Bushnell, who lives across the back alley from the Med. She marched over
to talk to manager Kirsten Schley. One thing led to another, Schley passed the
word on to owner Hans Morsbach, MBA'61, that a bread baker lived next door. Bushnell
was hired.

The
Medici Bakery opened the first week of June, a full month before Bushnell's Polin
oven made its way across the Atlantic from Verona, Italy. After the oven was assembled
during a blisteringly hot Fourth of July week, Bushnell began pumping out the
Medici's full bread menu: bagels, baguettes, challah (of course), ciabatta, Mexican-style
sweet concha rolls, country wheat and herb breads, levain, multigrain and rye
loaves, semolina rings and "torpedos," and whole-wheat sandwich bread.
She oversees four employees and, for now anyway, works two shifts: 4 a.m. to 11
a.m. baking and 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. mixing and shaping the next morning's loaves.
She takes catnaps in the afternoons and looks forward to the day when her staff
is fully trained and she can alternate shifts.

Bushnell's
favorite bread? Ciabatta. "It's simple," she says. "It has the
four basic ingredients-flour, water, salt, yeast-but there's a lot of personality
from just those four."

The
hardest thing about her job-aside from dragging her decidedly nonmorning self
out of bed-is, she says, the job itself. "All the breads I make elude me.
They're dependent on the weather, the oven and kitchen and rising temperature,
the humidity, the ingredients. They're different every day and every batch."
It's the baker's lot, she says, and the reason she wakes up every morning.-S.A.S.